Hello again. Sorry it's been a while. Being busy and my natural forgetfulness is a bad combination for this sort of thing.
Anyway, this time I thought I'd actually explain a little bit of what I'm doing. I realized that probably would have been helpful for you, and apologize for not doing so last time. So here it goes!
So with every book, we start with an outloud reading. We have to read the entirety of whatever book we're doing, in order to just get a broad picture of what's going on. This isn't a problem for books like Ephesians or Philippians, but it becomes a little harder when it's a book like Acts or Luke. But thankfully we are allowed to read each book in a maximum sized group of four people, so we don't have to read outloud by ourselves for two solid hours.
After that you can do one of two things: you can color code the book that you're doing, which is highlighting words, phrases, or ideas in the text in different ways to show that they're different observations. For example, say you're reading Genesis, and Abraham pops up. You would highlight or underline or use whatever symbol you use to show that observation to be a 'who' observation, so when you look back at your text later you can say 'oh, that's a who'. So the goal of this is to pick the text apart and break it down into more manageable pieces, while giving you a better understanding of the story itself.
Or, after the outloud reading, you can start with paragraph titles. The entire book is broken down into paragraphs, and you are left to come up with titles for them. This stage is nice because it makes you read through the text more slowly, as you're looking for a good title to sum up that paragraph. Again, this stage is designed to break up the text into more manageable pieces. But this is also helpful because by the time you're done, you can kind of follow the story just by the titles, because you already have the story in your head, so the titles just remind you of what's going on and fill in the blanks.
So after both of those stages are done, you move on to what's called the BRI, or Basic Required Information. This is where we do the historical background for each part of the book. The BRI itself is broken into two halves: One is devoted to information about the book, such as Authorship, Dating, and Recipient, in which you use both the text of the book as well as external sources to figure out the information of the book. It isn't always easy. I spent a long, long time trying to figure out a date for Galatians, for example.
The second half of the BRI is devoted to the historical background and setting that the book was actually going into. For example, when you look at Ephesians, you would study Ephesus and the religious and cultural happenings that the time to see what the state of the people would be, in order to give better context about what Paul is talking about. And sometimes, this part of the BRI is even broken in half, between Original Hearer and Original Reader. When you look at a book like Luke, you have to consider both, because the book is being written to Theophilus (Luke 1:3), but the stories include other people. They include the apostles, and everyone Jesus talked to, and everyone who actually heard Jesus speak, some 30 years before Luke was written to Theophilus. The cultural and religious settings for Theophilus and the people in the story are totally different, so you need to look at both of their backgrounds in order to properly interpret what the text means to both parties.
After all this and a few other minor steps (that are probably easier to explain in person), you can finally move on to actually trying to figure out what the text is saying. The book is broken down into segments, or charts, (when you do the paragraph titles, you add bigger sections as well that contain different ideas, these are the segments), and this is what you chart in. The segments don't really have any boundaries, they can be 10 verses long to more than two chapters (I've have both), it all depends on the text. So when you go into these charts to actually do work, the first thing you do is called your 'insides', and what that means is that you go back to your Bible, and look at everything that you color coded, and you take that out and you put it into your charts. These become your observations, the things that you look at and interpret. Once you have the entire segment filled with the observations that you wanted to include, then you can move on to your 'outsides', or trying to figure out what is actually going on in the text. You take your observations out of your 'insides', support them with other observations so you have an even better idea of what that particular observation is saying, and then you can move on to interpretation.
After you've gone through the whole book observing and interpreting and applying (after interpreting, sometimes you apply the truth that is there to yourself or the world or both), you do the final application. This is when you really take a look at something from the book and apply it to your life. This is half of what we are here to do. Yeah we're all here to learn the Bible and increase our knowledge of God and who he is, but at the same time we are all here to deeply change ourselves and apply the entire Bible to our lives, in order to truly grow closer to God. What good is it if only the mind grows but the soul doesn't? Knowledge for knowledge's sake is fun, but ultimately useless in an eternal perspective. If you don't absorb true knowledge, and have it actual change who you are an how you live in order to reflect God and live in his world more than ours, then you don't really have hope. Roman's 12:2 says it best: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of you mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect."
So that is what I've been doing. But how have I been doing? Well, pretty great. I paid of the first quarter of my school (still need like $3000 but not for a while) recently, we went through Acts, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, and Philippians in the last two weeks, and it was a lot of fun. Acts is a great, great book, and has probably been my favorite to work in so far (Acts and Titus are my favorites so far). We did three small books last week (1 & 2 Thess, Philippians), and that was an adventure. It was a weird mix between having free time and then being rushed when you had work to do. I think I prefer focusing on one book at a time. This week we are doing Romans, which is an incredibly awesome book, if not exhausting. The amount of theology and information doesn't really compare to anything we've done. Philippians is probably the biggest theology book we've done (in terms of content, not size), or maybe Ephesians, but Romans is three or four times as big and dense as any of those. It's great, but hard. After this we are doing both of the Corinthians in a week and a half, which will also be great but hard, as there is lots of theology and controversy in those, as well.
I have a couple simple prayer requests. Please pray for endurance as we go through the meat of the theological texts, and please pray that God would be able to break my heart for whatever he wants to show me through those.
Thank you, and God bless ---
Josh Miller
